Hasbro recently explained that the reason it didn’t include the main character from Star Wars: The Force Awakens in its new Star Wars-themed Monopoly game wasn’t because she was a female, but because it didn’t want to spoil info about her character that was already quite obvious from the trailers. But now that everyone and their goldfish has done their mandatory 135-minute duty and watched the movie, Hasbro is going to add a woman to the Monopoly mix. [More]

Today is an important date in the histories of both consumer protection and crowdfunding: For the first time, the Federal Trade Commission took legal action against someone who used Kickstarter to fund a project that they didn’t produce. That’s the good news. The bad news is that since the man behind the scheme has no money to distribute to backers, the settlement doesn’t actually do anything for people who backed The Doom That Came To Atlantic City. [More]

I find life-size video screen ads with images of people really unnerving, and that was before I came to realize that they could be watching me back. Toy company Mattel, out to promote its board games before the holidays, created a cool event that brought random shoppers and an actor in a remote location together…to play board games.

The folks at Hasbro have never had a problem letting everything from towns to universities to movies to big-name commercial brands slap their names on licensed versions of Monopoly, but a new version of the classic board game is unabashedly all about learning the value of today’s biggest fast food, retail, tech, and entertainment companies — everything a growing child needs to get ahead! [More]

There are many ways to win the game of Monopoly and thus, become champion of the entire world or at least lord it over your three brothers. Any strategy includes scooting around the board with a token you choose to symbolize the defeat of your enemies. Whether you pick the race car, iron, Scottie dog, wheelbarrow, shoe, top hat, thimble, or battleship, you’ve probably got a favorite (old shoe). But soon, perhaps too soon for anyone with even one nostalgic bone in their body, Monopoly is going to get rid of one of those forever. [More]

If there’s one thing every crack dealer hates, it’s being paid in Monopoly money. A 33-year-old man in Wichita, KS, was pulled over by officers last week and found bleeding from the head. He told police he’d just been tricked by his angry crack dealer into coming over to his house, whereupon the dealer pistol whipped his face. According to the police report, the victim told them that “a couple of weeks ago he bought several hundred dollars of crack-cocaine with Monopoly money and now the dealer was ready for pay back.”

We think the idea of “Credit Crunch,” a print-it-yourself board game in this week’s issue of The Economist, is great. We’re not convinced it’s exactly cost-effective to print the board, cards, and money with your own equipment, though—as someone suggests in their comments section, maybe a web-savvy reader should create an online version.

As if credit card-related debt wasn’t a big enough problem in the U.S., Hasbro and Visa want to fuel the fire. Hasbro is launching a new edition of The Game of Life called Twists and Turns that will replace play money with a Visa-branded card. Matt Collins, Hasbro’s vice president of marketing, said of the switch, “When we started to design a completely new edition of the popular game, we knew it was also time to reflect the way people choose to pay and be paid – and replacing cash with Visa was an obvious choice.”